


Forget-me-not

by warriorpoet



Category: Breaking Bad, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:28:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22210309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/pseuds/warriorpoet
Summary: The long, dark night of Mr. Driscoll's Alaskan soul.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 29
Collections: Blue Christmeth 2019





	Forget-me-not

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vomara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vomara/gifts).



The fact that there are places in Alaska that have 24 hours of darkness is buried somewhere at the back of Jesse’s brain. 

He doesn’t remember it until he sees the old grandfather clock in his living room say a quarter past noon and the sky outside his window is clotted with lingering twilight. It doesn’t seem right, like it’s not the right time of year, or he’s not far north enough. He knows it happens, but he's not sure what the rules are. 

His boots silently sink into snow that glows around him, blue-white from the dark sky. Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe the clock says a quarter after midnight. He’s still trying to get bearings.

Firewood. He just needs to pick up a couple more logs from the stack and bring them back inside. That’s all he has to do, and worry about the rest later. What time it is, what day it is, what year it is.

The cold air slices through his lungs when he breathes in, and the old fractures in his ribs sing their complaint. The pain is okay now, though, it’s the kind of pain that makes him glad he’s alive rather than wishing he was dead.

He starts gathering thick splints of wood in his arms, his gloved hands clumsy and fat. The world is quiet around him, so when he gets the feeling of something lurking at his shoulder, he tells himself it’s nothing, there’s nobody else out here, he's just being paranoid. He's safe now.

Jesse pauses, his ragged, painful breathing harsh against the hush. He tries counting to ten and makes it halfway before he turns and looks.

The shadows at the edges of the twilit sky seem to gather and exhale with him, slowly, shakily. There’s a light coming from the living room window where there wasn’t before, iridescent blue-white like the snow, changing and cycling through other colors in a syncopated rhythm. Red. Blue. Gold. Blue.  
His boots stomp over the threshold, slush and fresh powder spraying on the hardwood floor. The TV is on, too loud after the soft, snow-padded outdoors.

He’s pretty sure it wasn’t on when he went outside.

And he knows that voice shouldn’t be here.

“Did you know that you have rights? The constitution says you do, and so do I.”

The Saul on his TV is slumped and weak, black eye and blood dripping from his nose. 

“Do you think you’ve been unjustly imprisoned by the Aryan Brotherhood, but don’t want to take your chances in a federal penitentiary? Better call Saul!”

A finger gun points right between Jesse’s eyes. “That’s why I fight for you, Alaska!”

The logs clatter to the ground as he turns –

Jesse’s palms hit the cement wall, his fingers splayed and stinging, crusted with dirt and dried blood.  
It’s cold and dark, with that murky floodlight filtered through the tarp, and their voices are up there but too far away to make out.

He tries to scream, but it’s like his throat is stuffed with snow.

**

He doesn’t wake up. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t see sunlight at all. 

Somewhere between Todd hooking his chains up and drawing a jug of methylamine out of the tank, he just finds himself watching his boots tread through the snow again. He’s maybe walked half a mile into the woods behind his cabin, face numb and bones chilled, before he realizes something is off. 

Did that just happen? Did _this_ just happen?

Jesse stutters to a stop, his breath steaming and swirling in front of him like a hit from the pipe. 

A flashback, he tells himself. It’s been a while (days, maybe? Weeks? How long since he’d been here? How long since he’d been _there_?). He’s just forgotten how real they could sometimes get. 

He tries to tell himself the same thing when he sees an unmistakeable profile out of the corner of his eye, moving through the trees, but he’s a half-second too late.

“Mike?”

Jesse knows Mike is dead, but he knows with equal conviction that _that is Mike_ , leading him further into the woods, just a few yards away no matter how hard Jesse tries to catch up.

“Mike, hey – yo, Mike, _wait_ – “

Mike doesn’t say anything or slow his stride, just shakes his head and leaves Jesse to follow his tracks in the snow. The trees gather around him and pull together in circles, mocking sentinels come to jeer, to kick him while he’s down.

He loses Mike’s tracks as the snow turns churned and stomped, ice starting to crunch under his feet. A cloud blots out the moon, and that comforting map of Mike’s profile is forever gone, eaten away by acid in a plastic barrel. 

The shadows do that thing where they hold their breath and exhale with him again. Jesse isn’t sure of the way back now. He’s all turned around, and there’s that feeling again of something at his back. A hand falls on his shoulder, and he whirls around to find nothing there but a murky blot of shadow in the shape of a man.

Jesse feels the name before he hears it in his head. _Mr. White_.

He starts walking, not sure which direction he’s going, as long as it’s _away from there_. Mike’s tracks are missing from the snow, nothing there to lead him home, but he looks as he fumbles, tree branches grabbing at his jacket like long, gnarled fingers. Everything fades in and out of focus as he tries to see through the night—is it even night, or is it just dark?—squinting, trying to focus, shapes moving and whirling and nothing holding steady. 

He stumbles, hands and knees hitting the frozen ground (or is it the desert sand? Maybe it’s concrete?) with a sting. There’s a rustle and a crack to his right (footsteps? A gunshot?) and Jesse’s hands scrabble for a rock or a piece of wood or _something_. 

Nothing comes for him. 

A cloud drifts past the moon, and the light opens up a little more. The windows of his cabin burn bright in the distance.

**

By the time he reaches his door, Jesse can’t stop shivering. 

The doorknob in his hand is solid, the weight of the door substantial, the tread of his shoes across the floorboards connected and steady. But his skin feels like it’s made of spider silk, his bones set to shake loose until he disintegrates back to some other time and place. 

He walks through the cabin, methodically switching on every light in every room. He stares at the bed. The sheets and blankets are taut, pristine, no imprint of his body to be found. He can’t remember the last time he slept, or even tried to. 

Seeing things from not sleeping, he tells himself. It’s not the first time.

The last light he snaps on is the bathroom. A warm bath, he tells himself. That will settle his nerves, maybe send him to sleep. 

The shower curtain rings sing a scrape back along the rod, and Jesse looks down at a woman in the tub, blue skirt and blonde hair plastered to her skin. 

First, he recognizes Skyler White. Then he realizes the water in the tub is frozen over, and she’s encased in ice. 

“Jesus Christ,” Jesse breathes, and her eyes snap open. She screams, muffled and bubbling, her fists banging shallowly at the sheet of ice trapping her. 

His heavy boots slip on the floor as he runs, but he stays upright, gripping at the doorframe, he stays in one place and makes it to the kitchen, the drawer rattling as he looks for the ice pick. What if it’s actually her? What if she’s found him? What if she wants him to get caught with a dead body in his house? What if it’s a message from someone Walter forgot to take care of?

(But what if she’s not there at all?)

He runs back to the bathroom, starts stabbing at the ice, trying not to hit her but it’s so thick he needn’t bother, he’s not making any headway. He can see she’s fading, her eyes locked on his, pleading, and _hack_ it’s Jane’s blank eyed stare at nothing as he does chest compressions _hack_ it’s Andrea falling to the ground _hack_ he’s breaking the blue and Todd is waiting to weigh it and ship it off to his darling Lydia.

_Crack_. 

Jesse’s arm freezes. He can see his own reflection in the product, shattered, his own pleading eyes staring back at him. 

His hand falls again, but the moment lingers.

“You okay, Jesse?” Todd asks. 

“Yeah,” he mutters, resuming his task with renewed speed. 

“You kind of spaced out for a minute.”

“Yeah, sorry. Just… daydreaming I guess.”

Todd smiles and shakes his head down at his clipboard. “I don’t know, Jesse, sometimes it seems like there’s a whole other world going on in your head.”

Jesse pulls on his leash to go fetch a handful of Ziploc bags, tether rolling on its tracks like a shower curtain on its rod. 

**

He lays on the thin bedroll, hands clenched. The tarp flutters gently in the breeze overhead, and he tries to force himself to sleep. 

He remembers all of it. How he got out. Walter coming back, gaunt and shadowed; the gunfire; breaking Todd’s neck and driving out. Skinny and Badger and the money in Todd’s fridge, Ed the vacuum guy, his mom and dad and Jake’s birthday on the safe combination. Those fake cop welder assholes. 

Hiding in the back of a moving truck across two border checkpoints. Haines. His cabin and his truck and new life story. 

There’s no way he could’ve made all that up himself. All the escapes he imagined for all those months. There’s no way it could’ve been that detailed. 

“So why am I still here?” he asks the night, and it’s still night here, it always seems to be, just like it is there, in Alaska.

He can’t sleep. Time stretches and seconds feel like hours, hours like millennia. He gets up and paces the cell, the walls closing in on him, his panic too big for his body to hold. 

Jesse knows he can’t be here again. He’s not going to make it this time. He howls, flinging himself at the walls. He’ll burrow out if he has to. They won’t see him on camera. He won’t have to wait around for a dead man to come and save him again. 

Somewhere between running across the cell and flinging himself to the ground, he notices the touch of cold ceramic tiles on his skin. 

There’s an inch of tepid water at the bottom of the tub, and blood on his hands.

**

He finds his way back to the clearing in the woods, no apparition to lead him there, only the beam of his flashlight cutting across the trees. 

He switches off the light and holds his breath a moment, before his own voice shreds his throat.

“What do you want from me?”

Nothing answers.

“I didn’t make it all the way here for you to keep _fucking with me_.”

The leaves are still and quiet on their branches.

“We’re done, Walt. You’re dead and I’m not. Fucking deal. We’re done.”

Jesse waits. The shadows hold firm, and the moon still shines.

**

Now he’s afraid to sleep. What if he wakes up back there? 

He pages through the old phonebook he finds at the back of the pantry. It’s a couple years out of date (he thinks so, at least, but who knows what year it is anymore), but finds a number that works and makes an appointment. He drives into town, hands gripped at ten and two, and the slick road stays as it is, doesn’t waver and warp into somewhere else. 

Maybe it’s over. Maybe all he had to do was ask for help. 

The shrink has one of those lay-down couches with his armchair at the head, like in a movie.

Jesse keeps his cap on (Skinny’s old beanie, it’s proof, it has to be real, right?) scarf bundled up his neck. He can’t get warm. 

“I keep having these nightmares,” he says. “But I never know if I’m actually, like, asleep. I never remember falling asleep, or waking up.”

“Do you drink? Take any drugs?” 

Jesse’s tired eyes roll back in his skull. “No. Nothing like that. Look, I’ve been through some shit in my past, okay, but I ain’t really here to talk about that. I’m just not—can I just tell you what’s been happening now, and you can tell me if I’m going crazy or not?”

“All right.”

“There’s this… person. Someone I used to know. He’s… he’s dead, but lately I get the feeling like he’s not totally gone. Like his… his _energy_ or whatever still exists.”

“Like a ghost?”

He can’t tell if the guy is mocking him or not. He doesn’t care anymore; he just needs this out of his head. “No. It’s real. Everything feels totally real. But they’re nightmares. I mean, they have to be. I never exactly see him in them. I see people we both used to know. Mutual acquaintances. There’s this… evil. And every time I try to get away from it, it’s like I’m suddenly somewhere else. And that feels just as real, and just as bad.”

Jesse falls silent. He hears the shrink shifting in his chair behind him. 

“So this is all happening in the nightmares, while you are asleep? Or are these hallucinations you have while you are awake?”

The shrink’s voice is soothing, like a slow pour of warm caramel. 

“I never remember falling asleep,” he tells the shrink again. “It’s not like I ever even go lay down in bed or sit on the couch or on the floor. Nothing. I never wake up anywhere either. I’m just always… somewhere, and I don’t know what’s real. It’s like I’m awake all the time and it just all _feels_ real.”

“Do you think I am real, Mr. Driscoll?”

“Yeah, actually. More real than anything else lately. I can remember calling your office and making an appointment. I remember driving here. I didn’t switch out to somewhere else. So, yeah, I think you’re real.”

“Good. I am real.”

Jesse huffs into his scarf. “Okay, cool… that clears that up. Guess I’m cured.”

“But you think Walter is also real?”

The warm caramel ooze turns to a slithering, oily chill. Jesse’s blood turns to ice. 

“What did you say?”

“Walter is just as real to you as anything else you experience. He has yet to truly show himself to you, but you know that it is him.”

Jesse whips around on the couch and his feet hit the floor ready to run. 

A fine web of flesh, charred and decayed and peeling, reveals a skull with broken teeth that speaks in Gus Fring’s carefully measured tone, and his steely-eyed glare somehow still manages to pour from blank, empty sockets. 

“Did you really think that you could leave these things behind?”

Jesse’s feet hit the floor, and with a jolt, the wind is knocked out of his guts with the rattle of chains.

**

“Hey, Todd?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever heard of a guy named Driscoll?”

Jesse stares up through the grate at Todd, silhouetted by the floodlights, a curl of smoke blowing from his mouth.

“Nope. Can’t say I have. Why?”

“No reason. Just can’t get that name out of my head lately. Thought it might be someone that’d come by here and I’d heard his name or something.”

Jesse quietly chews his lip, a taste of salt and dirt that should just be a memory.

“Walt’s gonna come back, you know,” he says casually, squinting into the floodlight. 

“Huh?”

“Mr White. He’s gonna come back here and kill everybody. Except for you. I’m gonna kill you.”

Todd chuckles. “He’s already been back, Jesse. He’s not coming again.”

The tarp flutters down and blocks out the light.

**

Jesse screams himself raw. 

**

He sleeps. Finally. He sleeps, or he passes out.

He wakes with a jolt on his bed in the cabin, on top of his thick goose down comforter, boots and scarf and jacket still on. 

His heart races, and he’s drenched in sweat. It’s dark outside. 

It must have just been a dream. 

The pressure on his throat tells him otherwise. 

The dark corners of the room gather and swirl and come to rest on top of him. 

Walter, holding him down again.

“Why are you here?” Jesse rasps.

“As long as you’re here, I’m here, Jesse.” Walt says through the hint of a shadowed mouth. 

“You regret getting me out of there? Want to change your mind?”

“There are a lot of things I regret.”

Jesse can almost see his eyes, and the pressure on his throat tightens. “No takebacks, asshole.”

He swipes the knife he keeps under his pillow and strikes. When he makes contact, it’s his own eyes staring back at him, his own body breaking apart. 

He can't stop.

**

The next time Jesse wakes up, sunlight warms his window, the snow stained pale pink. 

There are bruises on his throat and three drops of blood on his shirt. 

The knife clatters to the ground, and he walks outside, hands moving in familiar patterns to check himself for injuries. 

Nothing new. Just the same old wounds. 

He sits on the porch and tries to breathe as the sun edges its way over the trees.


End file.
